Tom Yamachika

Tom Yamachika is the President of the Tax Foundation of Hawaii, a private, nonprofit educational organization dedicated to informing the taxpaying public about the finances of our state and local governments in Hawaii.
Tom is also a tax attorney in solo practice and has been since early 2013. Prior to 2013, he was with the accounting firm Accuity LLP, which was formed in 2006 from the Honolulu office of Coopers & Lybrand (which later became PricewaterhouseCoopers). Before that, he served as an Administrative Rules Specialist in the State of Hawaii Department of Taxation from 1994 to 1996, where he drafted rules, interpretive releases, and legislation on several different state taxes. Prior to that, he practiced litigation and tax law with Cades Schutte Fleming & Wright in Honolulu.

Dear Governor Ige: Whatever you may think of President Trump and the Republican-dominated Congress, they have thrown an opportunity our way, and you need to take action very soon—by March 21, 2018, to be exact—to take advantage of it. The Trump tax overhaul act, sometimes known as the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, provides two main incentives to encourage investment …

You may remember Groundhog Day, the 1993 film starring Bill Murray. In it, Murray played a Pittsburgh TV weatherman who, during an assignment covering the annual Groundhog Day event in Punxsutawney, PA, found himself caught in a time loop, repeating the same day again and again. On February 28, I was in a hearing in the Senate money committee, testifying …

Our Legislature is now in session, and one of the big functions of the money committees – the Senate Committee on Ways and Means and the House Committee on Finance – is to balance the state budget. The Governor submits a budget to start with, the Council on Revenues weighs in with how much money the State is expected to …

One of the bills making its way through our legislative system this session is one that would create a special fund for public education, and then funnel to that fund twenty-five percent of all the money that our General Excise Tax brings in. “25% of the four percent tax is just a penny out of every dollar,” proponents of the …

One of the more visible tax issues that our lawmakers will be thinking about this session is how to adapt the new federal tax law changes, sometimes called the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act and what we have been calling Trump Tax, to Hawaii. Each year, our Department of Taxation is required to consider the federal tax changes that have …

In the 2017 legislative session, our legislature passed an earned income tax credit (EITC), which its supporters maintain is the best solution to lift families out of poverty since sliced bread. At the Department of Taxation‘s urging, however, the EITC was made nonrefundable. Advocates clearly didn’t like that, and are already imploring the 2018 legislature to make the credit refundable. …

Most of us are very familiar with crosswalks and traffic signals. We pass a few of them every day. We might get stopped by a red light from one of them. But have we ever stopped to think how much one of these things cost? One of the bills introduced in the recent legislative session, Senate Bill 2004, tells the …

The National Taxpayer Advocate recently produced a “Purple Book” containing her top 50 recommendations for the IRS. One of them concerned “math error authority,” which brought to mind one of the failings in Hawaii’s tax system. On the federal side, disputes between the IRS and taxpayers play out through a lengthy process. The IRS proposes an assessment, the taxpayer responds …

One of the new, key components of Trump Tax is a provision important to the vast majority of small businesses. Practitioners may know it as the Section 199A deduction. Under Trump Tax, corporations that used to see a maximum tax rate of 35% got that rate slashed to 21%. About 75% of businesses, however, are not taxed at the corporate …

As we nervously await the opening of the 2018 Legislature, we wonder how our state will approach tax conformity now that the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, or “Trump Tax,” is now law. Most states, including ours, conform to federal tax law. That means we generally adopt the federal law provisions that tell us what is income and what we …